IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/15222.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Measuring Voters' Knowledge of Political News

Author

Listed:
  • Prat, Andrea
  • Angelucci, Charles

Abstract

We propose a methodology to measure knowledge of news about recent political events that combines a protocol for identifying stories, a quiz to elicit knowledge, and the estimation of a model of individual knowledge that includes difficulty, partisanship, and memory decay. We focus on news about the Federal Government in a monthly sample of 1,000 US voters repeated 11 times. People in the most informed tercile are 97% more likely than people in the bottom tercile to know the main story of the month. We document large inequalities across socioeconomic groups, with the best-informed group over 14 percentage points more likely to know the typical story compared to the least-informed group. Voters are 10-30% less likely to know stories unfavorable to their political party. Also, each month passing lowers the probability of knowing a story by 3-4 percentage points. We repeat our study on news about the Democratic Party primaries.

Suggested Citation

  • Prat, Andrea & Angelucci, Charles, 2020. "Measuring Voters' Knowledge of Political News," CEPR Discussion Papers 15222, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:15222
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cepr.org/publications/DP15222
    Download Restriction: CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Sergei Guriev & Daniel Treisman, 2019. "Informational Autocrats," SciencePo Working papers Main hal-03878640, HAL.
    2. Sarah Schneider-Strawczynski & Jérôme Valette, 2021. "Media Coverage of Immigration and the Polarization of Attitudes," PSE Working Papers halshs-03322229, HAL.
    3. Sergei Guriev & Daniel Treisman, 2019. "Informational Autocrats," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 33(4), pages 100-127, Fall.
    4. Jacopo Perego & Sevgi Yuksel, 2022. "Media Competition and Social Disagreement," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 90(1), pages 223-265, January.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:15222. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cepr.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.